Get to Know the Banjo Player on Beyoncé’s First Country Song

After music fans came down a bit from the surprise news that Beyoncé is releasing a country album (Act II, coming March 29), attention turned to one of her key collaborators in this genre shift. One of the album’s already-released singles, “Texas Hold ’Em,” prominently features the expert banjo playing of Americana darling Rhiannon Giddens. Seems a natural fit, as Giddens has been instrumental in promoting the contributions of Black musicians to country music, and she noted in Ken Burns’ Country Music docuseries that the banjo has African roots.

AARP recently interviewed Giddens on the heels of the 46-year-old’s 2023 Pulitzer Prize win for an opera she cocomposed with Michael Abels. It’s called Omar, and it centers on Omar Ibn Said, a Muslim Senegalese scholar captured in Africa in the 1800s and sold into slavery in America. That’s pretty weighty stuff, but she also recently put out more mainstream fare, a solo album called You’re the One. Here’s what Giddens told us about her musical journey, from North Carolina to the BeyHive.

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She picked up music very young.

“I was singing with my dad and my sister before I could speak,” Giddens says of growing up in Greensboro. “I had a normal soundtrack of someone who grew up in the country. My Black grandmother loved Roy Clark, so we watched Hee Haw every Saturday night, and I listened to whatever she put on — blues, jazz, contemporary Black gospel, a bit of everything.” From the white side of her family, she developed a love of Hank Williams.

Opera was an early interest.

“I was drawn to opera because they sing all the time and I wanted to sing,” Giddens says. She went on to study opera theater at Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio.

Rhiannon Giddens performs at National Sawdust on Aug. 17, 2023, in New York.

Andy Kropa/Invision/AP Newsroom

And then she went back to traditional American music.

“I found folk dance and string band music. I hadn’t really been an instrumentalist. I was just curious,” Giddens says. She now plays banjo, violin/fiddle and viola. “The banjo is part of the hidden history of America. I found out as a North Carolinian first, and then as a person of color second, that the banjo is an instrument created in the Americas by people from the African diaspora.”

She has recorded as part of a band (the Carolina Chocolate Drops) and as a solo artist. So far she’s won two Grammys, in the folk and American roots categories.

“I’m a really old-fashioned songwriter,” Giddens says. “I love a good song where you use the cleverness of the words to tell a story. Someone said to me after a show, ‘Different is your genre.’ I love that.” Her latest album, You’re the One, pays homage to great songwriters, with songs inspired by Dolly Parton, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin and Patti Page.